In honor of John Baldessari’s exhibition The Space Between, which featured the artist’s final painting series completed before his death in 2020, Sprüth Magers hosted a suite of programs at the Los Angeles gallery that invited Los Angeles artists and writers to engage with this intriguing and historic body of work.

The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, co-published by Sprüth Magers and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, with contributions from Barbara Bloom, Russell Ferguson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Catherine Opie and David Salle. To launch the publication, writer Michael Ned Holte moderated a panel discussion including Russell Ferguson and artists Liz Larner and Thomas Lawson, in which they discussed their various experiences and collaborations with Baldessari as students, curators, fellow professors, colleagues and friends.

Artist Stephen Prina, who studied with Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, led a public walkthrough of the exhibition that opened with a song written in homage to one of the late artist’s early paintings. In his talk, Prina describes the importance of Baldessari’s work to the formative years of his own practice, and offers insights into the connections between The Space Between and earlier bodies of work. 

For more information on the work of Stephen Prina, click here.

The artist Mungo Thomson led another walkthrough of The Space Between. Thomson studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving his MFA in 2000. As he discusses, the conceptual strategies that he employs in his work reflect, in part, his experiences as a student of John Baldessari’s at UCLA in the late 1990s. 

For more information on the work of Mungo Thomson, click here.